Why did the plan of "no buffalo out the park" work for the last hundred years? Why shouldn't it still work today? What changed? Who decided that just the buffalo numbers are the root of this problem? We need some more highly intellectual folks to help balance the eco system. They must have started to use the musical chair policy to select new upcoming advisers to guarantee the survival of our country's first national park. God have pity on all the plants and animals inside it's boundaries.

If you don't like Buffalo wondering onto you property, then move. You sound just as bad as people who buy homes next to a refinery and complain about the stink. Or a person who buys property next to an airport and complain about the jet noise.

There are two reasons the buffalo leave the park. 1. preditors 2. no feed. Being a "ranch Manager" you should understand the ramifications of overgrazing. The numbers of the bison herd are to large for the range they have. Increasing the range by allowing them to graze outside the park will only solve the problem for the short term. The issue is to little range, to many animals and to much emotion. If you run your ranch with to many animal units your range will become a weed infested mess. The park now has to many weeds, to many political ambitious people and no one thinking about the long term health of the bison. Allowing them to repuduce with no control program is doing them no favors.

Well put, Mark, its nice to hear from someone who is in the middle of the controversy.

There are NOT too many BISON. They are a migratory animal. They are NOT over grazing the Park. They are MIGRATING. There are NO public land allotments on the West side of the Park. Those grasses need grazed. Ther are NO cattle in danger on an entire Peninsula, that won't cost the taxpayer one red cent to allow Bison to inhabit in the Spring. It's a scam sham thank you ma'm policy that wastes our tax dollars. If Cattlemen don't have enough of their OWN land to graze the amount of cattle they have, then get rid of some of those COWS. People say there are too many Bison, well I think there are too many cattle for the Rancher to take care of if they can't graze them on their own land. The public land is set aside for the Public, and the Wildlife that LIVE there. Not farmer Brown and the too many cattle he has. Cattlemen Reduce your herds. Just like you keep screaming about reducing the Bison. The Bison herds are less than HALF of what they were, Reduce the CATTLE. Fewer cattle means fewer losses to predators too. Easier to keep track of fewer cattle. Cheaper to take care of fewer cattle. Save the Tax Payers some money and reduce the cattle herds.

oh give me a home where the buffalo roam!!!!! not!!!!!!!

So instead of 2500 dead bison, if this deal had been in place, we would have had 2475 dead bison!! Let's break out the champagne!! Plus, those "lucky" 25 would have to be hazed back into the park by April 15th, where in a harsh winter (like the one we are just know coming out of, they might still starve to death! I am overjoyed with this "breakthrough" deal!! The park is not overgrazed. It is buried under snow. You could have a hundred thousand bales of hay laying out in Hayden Valley and it wouldn't do the bison one bit of good if it's buried under eight feet of solid ice. Forcing bison to stay in the park during a harsh winter is like forcing bluebirds to stay in Montana during the winter. They leave for a reason. Had the original creators of Yellowstone National Park understood basic wildlife biology, they would have made Paradise Valley part of the park. That is why the elk, deer and pronghorn all migrate to Paradise Valley in the winter. Only the bison are forced to deal with harsh Yellowstone winters.

Mark, I appreciate your support for bison on a larger landscape that includes their critical winter range. The problem with the CUT deal is we paid for something we already owned. Removing the cattle feedlot from the 640 acre Trestle Ranch property owned by the CUT is fine, but the bison only get to use about 80 acres of this property, if that. Assuming 1 acre/AUM which is pretty generous in Gardiner, 640 acres would provide for 640 AUMs at $30/AUM (again quite generous consider the federal AUM is $1.35/AUM) times 30 years = $576,000. This is considerably less than $3.3 million and the bison don't even get to use the land supposedly leased for grazing. Again, we already owned the right to use the corridor. Thanks Frank N for pointing out many of the other problems with this deal, but I might add that the thousands of acres of conflict-free public land just across the river in the Cedar Creek Dome Mountain area is still off limits to bison under this agreement. Clearly, we need a new plan based on biological science, not political science.